Friday, January 24, 2014

Sherlock

I seem to be alone in rather enjoying this most recent series. It hasn't been without its frustrations, the primary one being that the show has, for the most part, given up on mysteries, with the final episode having a twist instead of a mystery central to it, the second episode only having one that's hardly dwelt on, and the first being mostly concerned with the mystery from the previous series, with an added silly one where Sherlock can't count.

Ultimately though, its been about the characters, and for the most part its been funny, sweet and interesting. I like Sherlock and Watson, I like Mary as a new edition, and I enjoyed watching them get up to things. While the final episodes twist (where Sherlock solves a mystery in the most straight forward way) was disappointing to some extent, it was character driven, and underlines just how much Sherlock, a character now given to showing feeling, has found himself compelled to love Watson, and by extension Mary.

2 Comments:

Spoiler alert!!!I enjoyed it also, but I couldn’t help but be disappointed with various decisions they made. The character stuff was the best (and funniest) stuff so far (I just adore the Mycroft/Sherlock interactions), but it seemed to lack momentum and I think the Sherlock/Watson love started getting a bit too over the top.

The first episode was good but I didn’t like the Oceans Twelve-esque “Yeah that whole last episode was an act” explanation for how he faked suicide (I didn’t much care how he actually faked his own death, but the way that it was his and Mycrofts’ set up the whole time therefore invalidating the previous episode made me feel a little cheated). And I still don’t quite grasp why Sherlock needed to fake it to John at all but maybe I need to rewatch… This is assuming the explanation he gave is the actual one of course…!

The second episode felt like it cheated again, with him mentioning two cases in the speech that not only happened to be tied together but culminate in that very wedding – they could have just done it a bit differently without doing it via the speech thing and it would have felt less conceited…

And the last episode is disappointing because Sherlock effectively failed, and I still can’t quite make sense of it - I mean, even if Sherlock’s plan worked and the vault was there sending CAM to jail, isn’t he therefore more likely to let the people after Mary know where she is…? Also, he says everything is in his head but I’m pretty sure when Sherlock walked in he was watching a video of when he almost burnt Watson to death… Maybe I need to watch again... The other frustration of the episode is it almost felt like they were starting to turn it into a melodrama with all the twists going on, but no matter because everything was forgiven with that last minute, JOY. Unless they end up making Moriarty Sherlock’s exiled younger brother or something…

We discussed this in person, but I can't really argue with most of your points here. I didn't mind the wedding coincidences though, it was a fun enough framing device that I thought it forgave the ills.